Introducing Sen (森), an insulated grocery bag that keeps the earth cool and your ice cream cooler. Bringing your own bag to the grocery store is one of the most sustainable ways to shop, and for students that walk, bike, skate, or take the bus to the store, Sen is the best bag for the job!
🙋Role
Marketing Researcher
Researcher
Product Designer
✍️Skills
User Research
Market Research
Manufacturing
Marketing Strategy
👥Team
1 Marketing Researcher
1 Product Manager
1 Design Lead
1 Logitic Manager
🔧Tool
Miro
InDesign
Photoshop
Statista
This is a school project which aimed to produce 18 products and sell them during a pop-up shop event held by our school department. From design to manufacturing of the product, our team conducted research in order to understand the user tastes and also the market trends.
Food does not stay at its ideal temperature when exposed to prolonged temperature changes, such as during a commute from the grocery store or when picking up takeout from a restaurant. College students often do not have access to fast and climate-controlled transportation for these activities, and thus face disappointment and frustration when their frozen foods melt or their hot food goes cold. Additionally, this can negatively affect the overall taste and quality of the food, incurring financial losses and creating unnecessary food waste
Our solution is an insulated, reusable grocery bag in the style of a convertible tote/backpack with a target market of college students. Adding insulation will prevent the waste and frustration caused by the changes in temperature during a commute from the store to home, and an added benefit is that users can re-purpose the bag for any other time they need convenient insulation, such as picking up takeout or bringing homemade food to an event
We named ourselves Zhong(众). Zhong is a Chinese word meaning "together." Our goal is to design with users rather than design for them. Our mission is to nourish the world by supporting the independence of individuals and reducing food waste in an innovative way. Together, we create a sustainable solution to carry freshness to the table
To create a human-centered design solution to the problem, we first sought out our potential users on their grocery shopping and takeout habits. In total, we received 43 responses to our survey.
Our team collected data to understand their reusable bag usage and the reason behind their choice. We focused on the findings such as better capacity and the convenience when commuting and incorporated those features into our product
Key Findings👀: Through the survey, we concluded that there is a potential market for users who have eco-consciousness or seeking suitable reusable shopping bags. Also, thinking of the carried items and convenience issues we discovered from the survey, we brought the results into consideration when designing certain features for the Sen bag.
Besides survey results, we also took our professor's suggestion of going to local grocery stores and observing the users. Some interesting findings include noticing that most people use plastic bags provided by the store; also girls are more likely to carry tote bags or cross-body bags, while guys often bring a backpack, etc.
We need to think of a larger scope. Not only selling the products through pop-up shop event, but also consider the existing competitors within the market. To determine the overall quality of competing products relative to our own, we compared 30 competitors based on four attributes: insulation ability, capacity (L), durability, and ease-of-use.
We compared insulation ability base on the materials, seller advertisement and customers review
Durability attribute was determined base on the customers’ reviews. We considered handle straps’ structure and their materials; zipper durability and ways the bags were sewed; and also compared some average product life time
Ease of use decided base on some features such as pockets, zipper, weight, and customers’ reviews.
I played a big role in the marketing strategy. The goal is to expand our market to reach college students who are interested in the product. The main marketing approach will be in two forms: digital and physical advertisements.
Instagram is the main digital platform that includes a massive number of users. Some rationale behind the decision is because:
Posters are distributed throughout the campus. During the different stages of the process, various versions of posters would also be designed.
Key Success💕: Some notable key successes of our marketing plan include to have display case set up a week before the sale. We also reached 70+ followers on Instagram. On the day of the sale, all bags sole out within the first hour. One of my favorite moment is when some customers come to me and told me that they were there because they saw the poster on campus, and they were asking if there will be more bags available in the future!
After deciding on the marketing plan, our group also drafted the possible user journey map in order to learn the constraint and identify opportunities. Our goal for the user journey map is to reduce the stressful experience and take advantage of the touch points.
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For more detailed information regarding the research, check out our brand research process book as the link below:
🔗Group Research Process Book
Successes:
- Overall store appearance
- Hallway display
- Posters
- Instagram engagement
Failure:
- Lost money
- Demographic data collection
- Itemized receipt
Moving forward, we would like to collect more comprehensive data to back our designs and collect more after-purchase data on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. We would want to have another prototype before the final to try to work out more manufacturing bugs. As those cost us a lot of time and effort. For time management, we were not expecting things to take as long as they did or have as many hiccups. For the future, it is good to know to give ourselves more time. We should also overestimate how much the manufacturing is going to cost as there were a lot of purchases our initial projected BOM did not account for, which left our actual total much higher than expected
